Nov 30, 2007

I'm sorry but this stuff is just too funny not to share with y'all non-Slashdotters. The post (Your Ex-CoWorkers Will Kill Facebook) was about how awkward it would be to add your colleagues and boss as your Facebook friends, and then maybe stumble on pictures of you and your friends pinned up in their cubicle sometime. And what do you do after you leave that job? There are actually some good ideas in the comments. Some people apparently use LinkedIn to do professional social networking and Facebook for personal friends. Here are some of the funny comments.

Pembo13 read the post with a sigh. Thoughts of his lost love came streaming in on him from every direction. The parent's post was all too remeniscent of that seductive MySpace page he fell in love with so many years ago. He was sure she was the one. He knew it down to his bones.

But just as most of the turbulent online relationships he'd known ended up, he too, was doomed to her foe list.

He'd heard so many stories of couples meeting and falling love, when was it his turn? If only they could hear his heart, pleading for their attention! His fingers tapped away a message over the keys. A message in a cyberbottle. A plea.

It's beyond me why people are so quick to spill their most personal secrets on a social networking site

It's because they're hoping to score with Hot Internet Chicks. Why is this hard to understand?

If playing every Mario game ever made has taught me anything it's that guys will do anything, even eating strange mushrooms and jumping head first into sewer pipes, for the vague possibility of impressing women.

George: You have no idea of the magnitude of this thing. If she is allowed to infiltrate this world then George Costanza as you know him ceases to exist. You see, right now I have Relationship George. But there is also Independent George. That's the George you know, the George you grew up with... Movie George, Coffee Shop George, Liar George, Bawdy George.

Jerry: I love that George.

George: Me too, and he's dying. If Relationship George walks through this door, he will kill Independent George. A George divided against itself cannot stand!

Nov 29, 2007

My discerning readers may have noticed by now that I'm not much for blogging about personal stuff that's been going on in my life. Or maybe not--personally I suspect my total readership here has the combined IQ of an eathworm. Ha, ha. That was me making a House-ian sort of crack. I promise I'll try not to do that--much.

Well, the past few days have slowly gone from being boring to more and more filled with anxiety, as the exam results come closer and closer. Mind has basically been on stasis, with online TV shows and movies keeping me entertained, apart from the quick snippets of The God Delusion read between computer reboots.

I have been programming quite a bit, though. At least, in JavaScript and CSS. Tried to make a simple CRUD web app using only those two--i.e. nothing on the server side. The aim was to make something that looked and felt Web 2.0-ish. It worked, except couldn't find any good way to store data on the local computer using only JavaScript--so in the end was forced to just pop up a new window with the data and ask the user to save it as a file with the correct name. Quite a stop-gap.

From there somehow I ended up trying out Dojo, which is an impressive framework but I'm still getting used to it, and trying to get it to work properly for me. It kind of gives the impression of being a bit buggy. But the use of `widgets' and easy theming are impressive.

Then I tried tackling rounded corners in HTML boxes using JavaScript-generated SVG images, on-the-fly, on the client side. Haven't got that to work properly yet, and needless to say, it will only work on browsers with native SVG support, like Firefox and Opera.

Update: Happily, I seem to have done OK in the exams, pulling through to the last phase of my time in Monash. It's just a huge relief. Now my last unit is left, consumer behaviour.

Nov 18, 2007

I was on ouou.com, watching some video when suddenly Windows faltered and crashed. I briefly saw a blue screen detailing some error and then Windows tried to reboot but couldn't find ntfs.sys. Whoops! It told me to try repairing the install from my original Windows CD. Now I know I have it around here somewhere, and it might be the best idea to just use it to repair Windows--after all I did pay a fair amount of money for it. But--I also had a Mandriva 2008 live CD lying around fairly close, and it's really impressed me with its performance on my laptop and its overall ease of use.

So I thought, what the hell, this is a sign, it's time to go back to Linux. And I did it. And ten minutes later, here I am with Mandriva installed and up and running. It looks and feels great, but I know it's not coming without a price. And so, here's a list of Windows software I'm really going to miss:

Microsoft Word. I was familiar with it, it did what I needed, and it was powerful so I could do a lot of other stuff with it, like easily writing VBA macros. Oh well.

EndNote. With EndNote and Microsoft Word working together, referencing became easy and powerful at the same time. I can only hope one day to create a perfect bibliography style file with BibTeX and use it with LaTeX.

EViews. Really going to miss this one, especially as I'm hoping to one day write a clone of it. Needed to familiarise myself with it more.

Firefox profile. I'd built it up over more than a year of browsing and storing passwords and bookmarks. Oh well. Will just have to build it up all over again.

Nov 16, 2007

Very impressive movie. I could have sworn in some scenes that the actors were really there, but apparently it's an animated movie, so there's no telling what was there and what wasn't. One thing I was really intrigued by was--you guessed it--Angelina Jolie. Her character appeared fully nude except for some body paint, and nothing got censored--even here in Malaysia. The movie got a PG-13 rating. I might be ranting here a little bit, but it just seems like kids these days don't even have to try to get to see nudity--it's just being handed to them nowadays. I'm happy to report Roger Ebert has noticed this too.

Well, not that I'm a prude--well, maybe I am if I have to see this stuff with kids under 15 or 16.

But yeah, really enjoyed the movie. And now, can't wait for the Dragonball Z movie to come out!